Disclaimers: I do not own Leverage or the characters or Lucille or a GPS. Sighs...

Silence reined in Lucille 2.0 as the team sped toward the last known location of their hitter. Eliot had been running interference while Parker retrieved the files needed to take down their latest mark when the sounds of a fight broke out over the coms. Nate cringed and Sophie chewed at one previously immaculate nail as they recalled the brutal altercation that they'd overheard, followed by the silence. While waiting for Parker to make her escape and join them, Nate and Hardison frantically called out to their hitter to no avail. Fortunately, the tracking mechanism on Eliot's ear bud was still working. Unfortunately, the small dot on Alec Hardison's GPS screen was not moving. Even before Alec brought Lucille to a screeching halt outside of the run down warehouse where Eliot Spencer should be, Parker flung the doors open and leapt to the ground with Nate Ford on her heels.

"Parker, wait!" Nate shouted, barely catching the nimble thief by her arm and pulling her up short.

"NO!...we have to….he could be…" the blond stuttered.

"I know…I know, Parker, but we can't just rush in there," Nate conjoled. "Just stay behind me, ok." With a sigh, the mastermind turned toward the warehouse, dreading what they might find and wishing for once that he was armed.

As the pair crept into the all too quiet building, the scene they found was not what they expected. Three men lay scattered across the concrete floor. One was moaning slightly as if on the verge of waking. The second was breathing heavily through a bloody nose, but otherwise not moving. Nate could not tell if the third was alive or not, and didn't attempt to find out as he still had to locate his hitter.

"Over here," Parker called out as she wandered further into the building her eyes scanning the ground.

As Nate joined her, he could see that the thief was following a trail of tiny droplets of blood each a few feet apart. The trail lead down a long row of shelves into a large area that housed a maze of crates stacked on each other.

"Eliot!" Parker half shouted/half whispered, only to have Nate hold up a hand to silence her when he heard a faint sound that soon turned into the more audible sound of someone retching. The two looked at each other, then began weaving their way through the stacks of containers with more urgency. Both stopped short when they rounded one final crate to find Eliot hunched against the warehouse wall, blood tracking down the left side of his face from his hairline to drip from his chin, one hand on his left knee and the other holding a bloody metal pipe around 18 inches long.

The hitter bolted upright at the intrusion, wild eyes scanning the thief and mastermind, his grip on the pipe tightening.

"Sparky," Parker called in relief, stepping toward her friend, only to have Nate pull her up short once again.

"Ford…" the hitter growled out. "I should have known you were behind this."

Parker turned questioning eyes to Nate who remained silent, studying the man before him.

"What? You weren't satisfied when you nearly got me killed in Dublin?" The retrieval specialist grumbled, shifting his weight and giving the pipe an agitated wave. "Just stay away from me," he ordered as he braced his ribs with his right arm, then muttered, "I have to get out of here."

The light finally clicked on for Nathan Ford, his breath catching. The man standing before him was not the hitter he had been working with for the past three years, the man he'd been joking with just this morning. This was the Eliot Spencer he had known and chased years earlier, a very different and very dangerous Eliot Spencer.